Many in college journalism - myself included - hoped that student
papers would remain largely unaffected by the turmoil in news media.
But apparently, when newsprint goes up 30 percent (again), everyone
feels it.
These events have serious implications for all of
us. Part of the problem is that traditional advertising has taken a
sharp turn for the worse both nationally and locally.
The
other, more significant issue is the rapidly changing patterns of news
consumption driven by our generation. Over the past months, these
trends have conspired to shake giants such as The New York Times.
And
slowly but surely, they're shaking up independent student newspapers.
The reality: Our generation didn't grow up with newspapers and we don't
have a strong attachment to them.
Breaking: College Life Sometimes Similar to Real Life, Part 2
Student newspapers are important, if imperfect breeding grounds for future journalists, public officials, writers, etc. etc. That they are threatened with the same type of ad rollbacks as the professional papers is a fact of life. But when this author states, "It's unfortunate. The Drudges, Huffingtons and other bloggers of the
future could never measure up to the Woodwards and Bernsteins," he is giving up. He's giving up because for him, there is no world after newspapers. Forget that top editors from the papers he probably reads now fill the ranks of Huffington Post and Politico, forget that online media only get better with time. What is more depressing here is not that student newspapers are struggling—some will go weekly, or four days a days a week, some will die, some won't—but that student journalists such as this author see little (if any) light at the end of the A-section.
